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May 11, 2020

Chuck Todd grievously misquoted Bill Barr on Meet the Press

By Andrea Widburg

On Sunday's Meet the Press, host Chuck Todd included a very short clip of a statement Attorney General Bill Barr made during an interview with Catherine Herridge.  In its abbreviated form, the quotation made it sound as if Barr intended to use the Big Brother technique of controlling history by consigning to the waste bin anything countering the official narrative.  In reality, Barr said quite the opposite, standing up for justice and the rule of law.

Here's the portion of the interview that Todd mangled:

Herridge: When history looks back on this decision, how do you think it will be written?

Barr: Well, history is written by the winner, so it largely depends on who's writing the history. But I think a fair history would say it was a good decision because it uphold the rule of law. It  helped, it upheld the standards of the Department of Justice, and it undid what was an injustice.

That is a short and unambiguous statement: Barr acknowledges that he has no control over the future as it looks back upon the past, but he is comfortable that his actions were entirely within the spirit and letter of the law, and that he is advancing justice by undoing injustice.

Indeed, the statement is so clear that it's difficult to imagine anyone misinterpreting it, but that's nevertheless what Chuck Todd did on Sunday when he had Peggy Noonan on his show:

 

 

For Chuck Todd to have cut out the meat of Barr's statement is tantamount to a fraud of omission.  He lied to Noonan, and he lied to America by omitting material information in the hope that people would rely upon his truncated version of the facts.  No wonder Trump was livid:

Meet the Press apologized — sort of.  It contended that it "inadvertently and inaccurately cut short a video clip" and that it regretted the error:

But how dumb do you have to be, and how limited your attention span, to miss the second part of a statement that took no more than a minute?

Or maybe you're not dumb at all.  Maybe you're malicious and are deliberately trying to destroy Bill Barr to defuse the effect of damaging information and possible criminal indictments coming down the line.  Or perhaps you're so blinded by hatred that you are incapable of recognizing the truth.

As it happens, Todd wasn't the first to promote this interpretation of Barr's deeply humanist statement.  Mediaite assembled a collection of blue checks on Twitter who were as incapable as Todd himself of understanding what Barr said:

These people need help.  What would help them most is for Trump to win spectacularly in November and for Congress to have a Republican majority.  With that outcome, maybe they'd finally get the reality check they need.

 

 

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